Current status

Detailed Description

Many terminal programs (like vim and ls for example) can take advantage of 256 color terminals,
and all xterms I know of support at least 256 colors and sometimes more.
So let's break through the artificial 8 color limit!

Also when preparing this page, while searching the net I noticed that
Mac OS X Terminal's default $TERM value is xterm-256color since Lion 10.7
That will ease some of the compatibility issues noted below.

You can see vim's default appearance using the above expanded palette at:

Benefit to Fedora

By having 32 times more colors available gives much better scope for using more appropriate default colors.
For example, users could set their terminal backgrounds to dark or light and have ls use colors
that are appropriate to either.

Scope

This will be mainly configuration changes.

After some discussion around whether it was best to update each terminal to adjust the TERM environment variable,
or whether to have a central config file, it was initially decided to update each terminal.
But after looking more deeply into this I thought of a way to use
the simple centralized config, without causing an issue for remote
terminals logging into the system. By keying on $COLORTERM rather than $TERM
we both get accurate identification of the terminal, and
non propagation by ssh. I.E. we get to easily and centrally
configure this feature for particular terminals and
also avoid having to add config options to each terminal
some of which discourage new config options on principle.

As an optional additional improvement, we could adjust the 256 color values used in ls by
editing the /etc/DIR_COLORS.256color file in the coreutils package, as it
doesn't take as much advantage of the color range as it could.

As the default vim color scheme has some issues in 256 colors, we should also provide updates on this. Search, SpellLocal, ColorColumn and MatchParen are hardly readable (see :hi under vim). We should also avoid uses of bold attribute in vim highlighting as it can look bad especially at smaller font sizes.
There are only a couple of uses of bold in the 256 color scheme so they can be easily avoided.
Bold should be left in the vim 8 color scheme due to the effective doubling of colors that provides.

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour

Documentation

Caveats

When connecting using 256 color xterms to other systems with SSH (which propagates the TERM environment variable), they will have to support the $TERM, or otherwise you will have a degraded experience. Debian for example traditionally didn't support xterm-256color unless the ncurses-term package was installed. Note ubuntu 12.04 at least does support xterm-256color so this is improving. Also as noted above Mac OS X 10.7 defaults to xterm-256color and so they're paving the way somewhat in this regard, so there should be less issues in connecting to older systems going forward. These points are mentioned in the release notes.